WinPTY-rs

Overview

Create and spawn processes inside a pseudoterminal in Windows.

This crate provides an abstraction over different backend implementations to spawn PTY processes in Windows. Right now this library supports using WinPTY and ConPTY.

The abstraction is represented through the [PTY] struct, which declares methods to initialize, spawn, read, write and get diverse information about the state of a process that is running inside a pseudoterminal.

Installation

In order to use Rust in your library/program, you need to add winpty-rs to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
winpty-rs = "0.3"

In order to enable winpty compatibility, you will need the winpty redistributable binaries available in your PATH. You can download them from the official winpty repository releases, or using any known package manager in Windows.

Usage

This library offers two modes of operation, one that selects the PTY backend automatically and other that picks an specific backend that the user prefers.

Creating a PTY setting the backend automatically

use std::ffi::OsString;
use winptyrs::{PTY, PTYArgs, MouseMode, AgentConfig};

let cmd = OsString::from("c:\\windows\\system32\\cmd.exe");
let pty_args = PTYArgs {
    cols: 80,
    rows: 25,
    mouse_mode: MouseMode::WINPTY_MOUSE_MODE_NONE,
    timeout: 10000,
    agent_config: AgentConfig::WINPTY_FLAG_COLOR_ESCAPES
};

// Initialize a pseudoterminal.
let mut pty = PTY::new(&pty_args).unwrap();

Creating a pseudoterminal using a specific backend.

use std::ffi::OsString;
use winptyrs::{PTY, PTYArgs, MouseMode, AgentConfig, PTYBackend};

let cmd = OsString::from("c:\\windows\\system32\\cmd.exe");
let pty_args = PTYArgs {
    cols: 80,
    rows: 25,
    mouse_mode: MouseMode::WINPTY_MOUSE_MODE_NONE,
    timeout: 10000,
    agent_config: AgentConfig::WINPTY_FLAG_COLOR_ESCAPES
};

// Initialize a winpty and a conpty pseudoterminal.
let winpty = PTY::new_with_backend(&pty_args, PTYBackend::WinPTY).unwrap();
let conpty = PTY::new_with_backend(&pty_args, PTYBackend::ConPTY).unwrap();

General PTY operations

The PTY provides a set of operations to spawn and communicating with a process inside the PTY, as well to get information about its status.

// Spawn a process inside the pseudoterminal.
pty.spawn(cmd, None, None, None).unwrap();

// Read the spawned process standard output (non-blocking).
let output = pty.read(1000, false);

// Write to the spawned process standard input.
let to_write = OsString::from("echo \"some str\"\r\n");
let num_bytes = pty.write(to_write).unwrap();

// Change the PTY size.
pty.set_size(80, 45).unwrap();

// Know if the process running inside the PTY is alive.
let is_alive = pty.is_alive().unwrap();

// Get the process exit status (if the process has stopped).
let exit_status = pty.get_exitstatus().unwrap();

Examples

Please checkout the examples provided under the examples folder, we provide examples for both ConPTY and WinPTY. In order to compile these examples, you can enable the conpty_example and winpty_example features when calling cargo build

Changelog

Visit our CHANGELOG file to learn more about our new features and improvements.

Contribution guidelines

We use cargo clippy to lint this project and cargo test to test its functionality. Feel free to send a PR or create an issue if you have any problem/question.